Universal AudioReviews of uaudio.com

Great audio plugins and a great experience. Universal Audio, Sonible, iZotope, and IK Multimedia are my favorite audio plugin companies, but I find Universal Audio has the best e-commerce experience of them all.

Best plugins in the world - but absolutely useless for support. Really quick to take huge amounts of money from you, but if you have a problem, forget it - they are non-responsive and have designed their products to be unusable without an internet connection. Avoid - find alternatives - save yourself the pain

I bought a UAD Apollo x16 last year plus a bunch of plugins. The digital interface works fine with Logic but Console doesn’t work so I can’t use plugins outside of Logic (isn’t that why you buy UAD?). The “support” team respond to emails but all they do is tell me to uninstall and reinstall, which I have done 5 times, with exactly the same outcome… Console doesn’t work. I regret buying UAD Apollo. I used Focusrite interface for 10 years without a single problem.

Upon installing the usual helper to download their plugins, these people FORCE your computer to install an AU icon on your MENU BAR. You CAN'T get rid of it unless you completely remove the app and delete some other files—with the help of an AI agent. On top of that, the only plugin I've ever bought is, I think, overrated, and I wish I'd never bought it in the first place. No need to be INTRUSIVE when you're making millions.

There seems to be a lot of hate for UA on here, and I think it seems fairly unfounded. Like, I get it's annoying when companies don't support products forever, but if you look into it, the old PCI cards are a hardware thing, and modern computers changed the way they work, so it's not exactly UAs fault for modern computers not being able to work with them. I had the same with a Focusrite Liquid 56 that was firewire, and guess what, my M series Mac doesn't support firewire anymore. Sometimes there are shifts that are big, and you can't know what those are going to be ahead of time. All I know is I've had an Apollo Solo/Arrow for years, and it is still great. I am also trying to choose between an Apollo x8p and a Volt 876. I have bought a fair few plugins, and I like the fact that now a lot are native now so you don't need the hardware to run them on and you can still benefit from some great sounds.

You said goodbye to the old cards, so I have to say goodbye to you. Sold everything

It’s one thing not being able to use your admittedly old PCI cards anymore, but the fact that you have to throw all your plug-ins in the trash—unless you want to shell out €1,000 for a compatible hardware unit just to use the plug-ins you paid a fortune for back in the day—is a real joke. You won’t see another cent from me.

Once a great company built on the solid ethics of giving the customer the best products and support, now completely overhauled by the wrong leaders and driven into the dirt if not the inevitable obscurity of dime-a-dozen software plugins you can get for free (and better) elsewhere. The final straw was the utter death of customer support. Don't take my word for it, try to contact them and see you'll be treated like a number waiting in line at the local deli selling mud pies for the tourist trade.